Reef Rehab 4 Day 3 Night Program

Our volunteers pay for their transport to and from Denpasar area, accommodation, three meals a day, coffee, tea, water, wifi, guide services (land and marine) and for divers, two tanks a day with weights, reef rehabilitation and survey materials, and your own Adopt a Coral baby which you plant. What you pay as a volunteer goes direct to the villagers providing you these services. We pride ourselves on thus being able to empower the villagers to improve their livelihooods through eco-tourism without reliance on handouts.

Day 1

You will be picked up from your nominated point and arrive at Les Village after a picturesque drive 3 hours north through mountainous Kintamani (lunch en route at own cost). On arrival at Les, you will be given a welcome briefing and tour by the village elders, followed by dinner. After dinner, you will watch a documentary Fish Don’t Cry about Les’s cyanide fishing history and the fishermen’s efforts at reform and reef rehabilitation of the reef.

Day 2

AMYou will have a classroom session on coral transplantation and the coral growth health and monitoring methodology of National University of Singapore’s Tropical Marine Science Institute (NUS-TMSI). We will test you on your knowledge of coral ID so be prepared and revise your training manual beforehand. In the first dive, you will have a check out dive and a tour overview of our underwater coral farm.

PM Around noon or after lunch (depending on wind conditions) on the second dive, you will collect coral recruits from the underwater coral farm. You will either then transplant them directly onto the reef benthic, or go back to surface and glue the baby coral to a concrete plug. After it sets, you will do a second dive to plant the plug into an underwater coral table or rope nursery.

Day 3

AM You will have a classroom session on to how Les Village’s sustainable netting and self-policing practices work. You will learn about NUS-TMSI’s butterfly survey methodology, and be tested on the butterfly fish species and sizing ID. In your first dive, you will conduct a butterfly fish survey on a 70 meter transect over a control site. In your second dive, you will conduct a butterfly fish survey on a 70 meter transect over a site where our corals are transplanted onto the reef. After your surveys, you can go for an underwater fish quiz where the guides point out fish and you ID them with your underwater fish slate.

Note: You must swim SLOOOOOW during your fish survey else you will scare the fish away! 2 meters a minute is the speed.

Between diving, if the fish buying agent comes to the village, you can ask to see the ornamental fish sorting centre and learn about the ornamental fish trade.

PM

After lunch, you will enter data from your survey sheets.

Day 4

AM At your choice (and depending on your no-fly time), you can have either:

· two dives of coral/fish monitoring; or

· trek to the famous Les waterfall and learn about the village’s traditional Subak irrigation management system.